everything i need

image by jill dimond

My heart was knit back together by wildflowers a month ago in Inverness, California.

My soul was returned to me by wide open spaces.

I had two moments of overwhelming gratitude. One came as I crested the hill into Olema. This is the place of arrival, where the land really opens up and you have the long view of where you are going. This gratitude was for Jim, my beloved friend, gone nine months now, and for Les, my husband. I knew I would not have made the solo trip (my first in a decade) if it were not for both of them. Jim, giving me courage and companionship from beyond; Les, buying me groceries and packing the car for me here on this side.

If I had some of Jim’s ashes, I would have carried them with me to Schooner Bay, a part of Drake’s Estero set in Point Reyes National Seashore. When I passed by it last October, in late afternoon autumn light—ten days after Jim died, it did something to me.

On the night I arrived at my cabin in Inverness, which was situated way up a winding road with a view of Tomales Bay, I had dinner with Jim, chatting amiably with him via voice memo while listening to Spotify and eating millet with steamed vegetables.

I made Jim another voice memo from the shore of the estuary the next day, where it was windy, glorious, and gray. Geese, egrets, crows, a couple of turkey vultures fighting over a leopard shark, and me. “I’m in the middle of nowhere! I’m in the middle of nowhere! I’m in the middle of nowhere!” I began, and then I told Jim everything about everything I was seeing for a long time, and kept talking to him as I drove back out Oyster Road until I just had to stop for a while, open my car window and be quiet with the wildflowers, which were so much to take in—bursting with color and love and over-sized zeal.

There’s another spot that has always done something to me. It’s just as you leave the park, coming down a hill, to head back into Inverness. And I cried then, this time with gratitude for being alive to see so much beauty.

I’ve been home a month now. I am changed and I think, in a way, it was something I have been working toward. It wasn’t easy to go. My health has been all over the map this year, at times pretty bad.

I have experienced such intense grief and loneliness since Jim died that a part of me was afraid to go somewhere alone, at the same time a part of me felt I could do it, and needed to do it, and even if it was hard, that I could handle whatever came.

But I was not lonely. I was joyous. I was at peace.

I had everything I needed.

And I think, in a way, now I know, I still do.